


What We Have Left to Lose

by Severa



Series: Aftermath [3]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: AU, Aftermath Series, Asgard, Avengers: Endgame AU, Background Relationships, Dysfunctional Family, Everything is a trash fire, Gen, Journey into Mystery - Freeform, Lean into the weird Norse shit, Let’s get Loki back in play soon I’m impatient too, Let’s make some Iron Man shit up, Pepper will not be shelved fight me, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Tags will update as we go, Whump, agent of asgard, more Hela love, unexpected exposition for three parts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-10-27 10:26:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17765039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Severa/pseuds/Severa
Summary: Things come into focus for the Avengers. Friends and family rise from the ashes, Hela makes good on her promises, and the natural order of things no longer seems so important. Loki, for one, certainly isn’t exactly sure what’s right or wrong anymore.





	1. Team Meeting

Natasha had never been good at cleaning things up. She was good at covering things up. That was her job; making sure no one knew what happened, where it happened, or how.

But covering up the fact that half of all life had died was impossible, so here she was, cleaning up. Locating survivors and confirming the disappeared, trying to make a team out of the fucking mess they’d become. That wasn’t her job either, but her doing it was better than Steve or Tony trying. She had less to cry over; less to lose. Far as she was concerned, the people she cared about were still alive and kicking.

Clint would respond as soon as he could. So would Laura. But in the meantime–

 _“Um,”_ Tony had been shaking, confined to a bed in the medical wing as white-dressed nurses prodded him with needles. He put a hand protectively over his chest when the doctor seemed too curious. _“Pe—uh, Spider-man—and I went out with the wizard. Strange, that’s his name, er, Stephen Strange, I think. Friday’s not sure.”_ He wouldn’t look at her, staring into the middle space between them. _“Ran into some morons calling themselves the Guardians of the Galaxy. Uh, and the blue robot chick. Nebula. Lookin’ for someone named Gamora.”_ A few, careful questions later, she managed to get the truth out of him. _“Just-Just me. Nebula. That’s, uh… That’s it.”_

Thor’s story was worse.

 _“We were on our way here when Thanos attacked,”_ he’d explained. _“Half of Asgard was killed. Again. Heimdall, our gatekeeper—he died protecting us.”_ He pushed his hand through his hair, cropped short. Some of it had been cut closer to the skin, streaked like a lightning bolt across the side of his head. _“Loki knew they were coming. Warned us. We had a plan, but…”_ His smiled pulled at the few heartstrings she still had, but she didn’t let it show. _“…Well, Loki’s plans don’t always work out. You know.”_

She’d seen the rest herself. The ones who’d disappeared in Wakanda after Thanos’ snap: Sam, Bucky, T’Challa, Wanda, and a tree named Groot. The Vision, dead. And there were probably more. There were most definitely more.

The list of the undetermined – Clint and Laura Barton, their children, Jane Foster and Eric Selvig, Pepper Potts, Nick Fury – grew longer by the day, familiar names added every time someone else came to her. She couldn’t help but wonder what (or who) a Valkyrie was, and by all of Thor’s accounts, Korg was more boulder than man.

She was currently following a lead on Jane Foster, phone in one hand and coffee in another, when Steve strolled into the throne room. It was roughly six in the morning, sunlight still a pink wash over the horizon.

“Morning,” she murmured over her mug, settled in one of the cushioned chairs meant for council, watching information flicker in front of her.

“Morning.”

She pointed her toe at the holographic display, hands occupied, and swiped the timeline on a video feed a few hours further. Foster had been tracked down to the Greenwich Royal Observatory.

Steve, not paying much attention, lingered at the window, looking out at the dim morning light and the city. It was quiet now, most of the initial chaos died down, the ones not in a hospital trying to clean up the parts of the city that needed it most. Natasha tried not to wonder what was on his mind. She could hazard a guess.

Jane continued to not fade to dust on screen as Okoye marched in, talking quietly with a bleary-eyed Rhodey, who paused and bent to adjust his leg braces. And what a mess that was, she thought, watching astronomers fade to dust on screen. Rhodey being so willing to help them after they’d snapped his back in half.

It wasn’t like any of them had a choice, though. The end of the world didn’t care about civil wars.

Foster, startled, stumbled back from a large telescope and knocked over a chair on screen.

“…It’s not so bad, I think,” Shuri’s voice came through the large throne room doors, footsteps nearly inaudible alongside Bruce’s and the march of her guard behind them. “The backup is stable. But his functionality without the stone…”

“Well, he was an A.I. to start. He might just revert. JARVIS...”

“Ultron,” she reminded sharply.

“Let’s hope not.”

Busy with the hologram, Natasha didn’t look up to greet them. Bruce settle into the chair left of the throne as Shuri sat.

“Is this about Vision?” Rhodey interjected, standing back up and stretching one leg. “Tony wants to see him. We should talk to him first.”

“How is he?”

“Fine. Ditched his room this morning.”

Okoye’s expression betrayed her disapproval, but Natasha wasn’t surprised. Tony didn’t stay still for long.

“Clint?” Steve wondered, settling down into the chair beside her.

“Not yet.”

She kept her composure carefully in check. There was an established, unspoken rule between them all: everyone was alive until they weren’t. Worrying that they weren’t wasn’t productive — they had enough chaos in their lives as it was.

“We’ll find him, Nat.”

The expected response didn’t come from the expected source. Tony’s voice might’ve startled her on a different day, but today she just gripped her mug a little tighter and settled back, appreciating the warm ceramic in her palms. But Steve… well, Steve was a mess.

“I know,” she murmured.

Steve, in her peripherals, looked like someone had socked him in the chest. He didn’t say anything to greet Tony, seeming to hunker down where he sat, shoulders forward and gaze aside, hands tense on the armrests. It was all clear as day, but Tony was ignoring it as well as she was.

“So, uh,” Tony said, bodily blocking Steve out of her peripherals as he stepped between their chairs. “Anyone going to explain the talking Raccoon?” Natasha looked up and found Thor’s newest friend sitting on Tony’s shoulder as he leaned towards her, holding the back of her chair for support. “Found him on my way over. Heard you were meeting without me.”

Rocket huffed, whiskers bristling. “Found me? I ain’t the one drinkin’ myself to death before sun-up.” He jumped down off his shoulder into the center of the room, adjusting the potted plant under his arm for the fall. “Where’s Thunder-head?”

“Well, I don’t hear him snoring up a storm,” Tony muttered, shrugging the wrinkles out of his t-shirt. He was still wearing the loose clothes he’d stolen from the med-bay, a white t-shirt and plain sweats. “He’s probably trying to eat half the kitchen. But hey,” shoving his hand in his pocket, he rifled around for a moment before he found what he wanted, palming a intricate silver flask against Steve’s chest with an audible _smack_ and slosh of liquid, “the man’s still got a good taste for booze.”

* * *

Tony wished that seeing Steve hadn’t made him feel so relieved.

 _He’ll know what to do_ was the first thought he had to swallow down, rattling around in his head like it meant something. And it might’ve meant something, once — before Sibera and the shield to the chest. Before Bucky Barnes and a whole mess of secrets.

(Those were the things that still ate him, that’d made him hesitate to call when shit hit the fan. The thoughts that made him restless, gave him nightmares and made him wonder if all of this was worth it.)

So, yes - it hurt to see Steve. He wasn’t ready for it, wasn’t ready to forgive him, but here he was feeling _relieved,_ like somehow them being together would make this all right. Like they could handle the worst when they could barely handle each other.

(If only he’d known Steve was thinking the same thing - _He’ll know what to do. He always does._ \- and hating himself for it, guilty and raw and vulnerable.)

Thirty minutes after their god-awful meeting had started, Tony closed his eyes and leaned his head back, feeling out of place occupying the chairs of Wakandan delegates that had probably turned to dust. Everyone was talking around him, over him, but he didn’t have the energy to interject. He shouldn’t have given the flask of mead to Steve. He shouldn’t have left his hospital bed. Pepper was still out there somewhere, so what good was he here, caught in conversations that didn’t even pretend to be constructive? There was work to be done. Press conferences to suffer through. An assistant-turned-CEO-turned-fiance to find. Man’s best autonomous friend to fix, stowed away in a lab with his frontal cortex ripped out.

“Friday,” he muttered to no one, tapping his fingernails against the metal plate in his chest.

 _“Standby,”_ was her impatient response, which only rattled him more.

As many times as he told himself she was working on it, that he reminded himself that she was doing everything she could do because she was the _best_ , he had made her the best, it didn’t stop his blood pressure from steadily increasing.

His hand passed over his eyes and he leaned further back in his chair, relaxing too heavily, masking his expression from the room. The morning after had already come too quickly; he wanted it to be night again, when he could disappear back to the tasks at hand.

“We have to find the stones first.” Rhodey pointed out for the hundredth time. “We can’t do anything without them-”

“...Shouldn’t we be waiting for Thor?” Bruce wondered, interjecting nervously. Rocket talked over him.

“And do what with ‘em, huh?” Tony jostled as he felt two paws dig into his shoulder, Rocket stepping down from his perch on the back of the chair. He glanced up to see him shaking his head. “Those stones are nutso, kid. Me and my friends could barely hold onto one _and_ Quill cheated.”

“Loki had two,” Steve said flatly. He was rolling pretty easily with the addition of a talking raccoon. (It wasn’t that hard, really, Tony thought, what with the shock and the numbness. Nothing could get more unbelievable than what had already happened.) “Had no problem using both.”

“Loki’s Asgardian,” Bruce added.

“A God,” Shuri corrected quietly, picking at a fray on her sleeve. Okoye shifted uneasily at her side.

“Yeah, but two still ain’t six.”

“Not much of a plan,” Natasha murmured, passing her empty mug between her hands. “We have to find Thanos first, either way.”

“He’s gone.” Tony snapped. The room quieted and he covered his face with his hand again, gesturing weakly towards the ceiling with the other. “And I don’t know about you, but I can’t track anybody through magic portals. Wanda was the only one who might’ve been able to. Hell, Loki even, but…”

Steve wrung his hands together, folded between his knees. Tony barely saw it, tempted to finally take a good look at him, but before he could give that a second thought, Friday was chattering in his ear.

_“Boss?”_

No, Tony realized, not in his ear. To the room at large. From the ceiling, where she was definitely, absolutely not supposed to be. How had she—?

“Excuse me?” Shuri said, flabbergasted. Okoye looked to her for instruction.

 _“I’m sorry,”_ she said automatically, _“It wasn’t my first choice, but he insisted.”_

“Who insisted?” Shuri demanded. She was looking at the ceiling like there was something particularly offensive about it; everyone else was looking at Tony, who was, for the lack of a better term, buffering.

_“I don’t set the permissions of my systems.”_

“Friday, what are you talking about?” he finally managed, throwing his arms out in frustration. Right when he thought there was no way things could possibly get any weirder, the most consistent thing in his life went and threw a wrench into everything. Friday wasn’t supposed to surprise him. The went against the whole point of her and the others. JARVIS and DUM-E with his merry band of bots were the support system that kept consistency in his life.

“You have a phone call. From a pay phone.”

“I— I _what?”_

But before he could find that last piece of sanity to lose, there was a crackling noise. The silence of an open phone line with no one on the other side, as confusing as it was ominous. Tony stared into the open air, unable to escape the feeling that the world was falling to pieces around him again. The one thing that wasn’t supposed to go off the rails was careening dangerously towards the edge. If his tech was the next thing to go, he might as well launch himself back into space.

“Jesus, Frida—”

_“My apologies.”_

A distinct, familiar male voice sent a shockwave through the room. Steve stood straight out of his chair, Bruce jumped, and Rhodey went a shade paler. Natasha looked up from what she was doing, staring at the ceiling. Rocket looked around for explanation, but Tony was too busy losing his mind to care.

_Viz?_

“Uh— Ah,” Steve looked at the ceiling for having no place else to look, a painful shred of hope in his uncertainty. “Vision?”

It wasn’t possible. Vision was miles away in a secret underground laboratory that Tony hadn’t found yet; Vision was _dead_ with his brain ripped out of his skull. He couldn’t be talking to them right now. He couldn’t be at a _pay phone._

 _“Captain Rogers?”_ asked Vision’s voice. _“Are you well?”_

Tony shared an unsteady look with Natasha as Steve stupidly leaned into hope. She was searching his expression the same as he was searching hers, wondering about the impossible. He caught Rhodey’s hesitant gaze next, then Bruce’s. It didn’t make sense. Vision just didn’t make sense… But the only alternative wasn’t possible either.

“Vision, what— where are you? How—?”

“Steve…” Bruce warned, “Wait a second.”

“Impossible,” Shuri whispered. Rocket rolled his eyes and scoffed, crossing his arms with a huff.

“I thought this dude was scraps.”

“No,” Tony said quietly, not moving in his chair. “I mean, he’s… he’s not—“

_“Sir?”_

He felt the blood rush out of his face. Felt the shock settle in, an empty feeling in his chest. He couldn’t— He didn’t— If he let himself hope, he knew it couldn’t be true.

“...Jarvis?”

 _“Sir.”_

Rhodey cursed in awe. Tony’s heart jumped to his throat.

 _“I’m calling on behalf of Miss Potts. Rescue Protocols are in effect. Could you…”_ There was a pause and Tony remembered to breathe over the still sensation in his chest. _“Could you, perhaps, send a car?”_


	2. Rescue

Asgard was a ruin.

Thor stood among the charred remains of his homeland, drifting between the fallen buildings without aim, wandering like a lost soul. Here, where no life thrived, where the world was grey, black, and white, he was the only streak of color: a wash of red and gold that didn’t belong. Light obeyed no laws, circling around him in orbit, casting shadows with precise lines, striking contrast over rubble. It made it seem like everything were moving, perhaps falling, but it was only an illusion. Nothing here would ever move again. Asgard was no longer subject to the laws of the living, of time or logic. It was dead and gone, existing only in his dreams.

Even in his dreams he wasn’t free of the horror.

His feet brought him down an ashen path of a market street. The bare skeleton of a tall, gnarled tree loomed over him as he navigated the rubble, looking for something, but having no idea what it was. A memory, perhaps, or a person? Jane in awe of a child’s ball; Loki stealing his first dagger at nine years old. Would they be here if he remembered them? Would Asgard live again if he decided it would?

Light circled. Time dragged on. Thor blinked and tried to make sense of it all, Stormbreaker in hand, trudging through stone and dust and—

Something cracked beneath his foot and he stepped back, startled by the sound. Dread crept into his heart as he saw the white streak of bone beneath his boot, the echo of Loki’s neck snapping in his ears.

A skull lay shattered at his feet, too small, too fragile and innocent to be fair. Children screamed in the darkness, burned alive by the fires of Muspelheim. Thor remembered telling Loki to burn their world to the ground.

 _“Don’t you understand?”_ It was the voice of his brother, a million realms away, echoing with an eternity between them. _“I’ve razed realms in your name. Run rivers red. Burned our people… slaughtered them all, in your name, and yet it’s me they call villain?”_

 _I had no choice,_ Thor tried to tell himself. But it wasn’t true.

Through the graves of Asgardians he stepped more carefully, still looking, still searching, as the world cast him in sharp shadows and harsh light. Asgard was naught but ashes and bone. Mjolnir crumbled at his feet a million times; Loki dangled in front of him a thousand more. Everything that made this place home was gone by his own decree. By his sister’s ambition. _Burn it._

Once his feet began to ache in his boots, once time had slowed so drastically that it nearly stopped, Thor finally found something. Behind a fallen arch, decorated with the engravings of his grandfather’s legacy, he saw something white move against the backdrop of Volstagg’s favorite tavern (burned, black, and buried). Heard the scrape of stone against stone, a boulder of a man standing in the wreckage, looking at rocky palms. A woman in white armor stood with him, but they both seemed so far away. Muted and grey, like the world around him.

_Korg?_

Thor opened his mouth to speak, but Korg’s disbelief came first.

“Oh, man, this is _weird._ ”

Light stopped moving. The Valkyrie, dressed in the armor of her creed, reached out for the open air as Korg began to crumble.

“No-”

The world spun out before he could call their names, before he could scream. He tumbled into the dark as that odd, lingering light faded, Asgard’s ash and bones swallowed whole by the universe. He fell backwards into the black, fell headlong into nothing until he found something down in the dark. A mist on his face. The crash of ocean waves in his ears. Soft, wet Earth beneath his knees and—

He opened his eyes and found himself on the cliffs of his dreams, the old Bifrost burned into the grass and the sea spread out before him, glistening with the light of an impossible sun.

 _This place,_ he thought, and remembered his Father, his brother, his sister — his hammer, shattered. The culmination of all of Odin’s lies. The end of one King and the beginning of another; a coronation and banishment all at once. _Again._

Laughter threatened to bubble up in his chest as he thought of the first time they’d tried to crown him — of Frost Giants, arrogance, wars, and anger — and realized that, no, none of them had ever been given what they were promised. Hela’s ambition had earned her exile, his rage had earned him the same, and Loki’s madness had driven him to take his own banishment upon himself.

Odin had promised them crowns, promised them the Nine Realms, and instead given them one each. To Hela, he gave Niffelheim; to Thor, Midgard; to Loki, Jotunheim, a place that he would never claim. Asgard would always and forever be Odin’s. Destroyed, it could never be theirs.

Thor wanted to laugh. Wanted to cry. Wanted to take his name and drag it to the ground, bury it here on Midgard and blast it into oblivion. _Odinson._ He’d been a better Father in death than he’d ever been in life. _Are you Thor, the God of Hammers?_

No, he was Thor, King of Asgard and the Eight, God of Thunder, Avenger, and Revenger. A King without a throne. A single Guardian for every realm.

 _Home is here,_ he remember his father saying. Here, where the humans had called them Gods. Where belief still lingered in the hearts of man and his hammer lay crumbled, a relic of a time that seemed so far gone.

“Well.”

A familiar, unwelcome pain struck his shoulder like a bolt, sidelining him with a stretch of white-hot pain. But there was no need for a frantic search or scramble; even as he leaned away from it, attempting to pull free, the weapon slid deeper between flesh and across bone, scraping pain all the way up to his teeth. Sparks played at the edges of his vision.

“Hello, darling,” Hela said, leaning into her dagger. He dared to look at her through the pain, as dangerous and deadly as she’d been before she’d died with Asgard, the same tattered clothes clinging to her skin that he’d first seen her in. “Please tell me you’ve a good excuse for loitering around.”

 _You’re not real._ If she were, they had a much bigger problem than Thanos. _Can’t be real…_

“Oh, I’m very real.” She twisted the blade and his arm twisted with it, teeth snapping against each other in pain. “What _did_ you expect?”

“Hela.”

“Hm?”

He blinked through the white veins in his vision, streaks of lightning sparking in his fists. Electricity crackled in the air as her knife grew longer beneath his skin, a silent threat between them. If she killed him now...

“You look good. For being dead,” he bit out, faking confidence. “Still the worst, though.”

“Thank you.” Her smile was dreadful, a horrible sort of sweetness between her thin lips. “But you were the victor, oh mighty _All-Father_ ,” each word was precise, punctuated with sarcasm. “You rule the Nine, not I.” She ripped the blade out of his shoulder and he yelled with it, grabbing at the wound. “The Eight, I suppose.”

Every instinct said to fight. To run. To scream. But he couldn’t— _wouldn’t_ , because it was just a dream. _Just a dream._ If she was actually here, if they were actually on this cliff fighting, he’d be bleeding. But the blade slid out clean, leaving nothing but an echo of pain in its wake. What was it with his siblings and stabbing, anyway?

“And?”

“ _And_? By the Norns, brother.” He felt her nails dig into his underarm as she hauled him to his feet, away from the remains of his (their) hammer in the grass. He stumbled and she held him fast, letting him find his balance. “If you’d any sense about you, I wouldn’t hate you half as much.”

He did feel blood this time, running hot and smooth under his arm when her nails cut into soft flesh. He felt the magic slip between the cut before it took hold; that frigid, unnatural thread weaving through his veins, not so different from his brother’s tricks. The spell pooled in his good eye and he saw her through the other, a digital rendering of sight muddied by a vision of her make. Fires burning and Valkyries falling in unnatural light, the same he’d seen in Asgard. A green flame at a forge… The Grandmaster’s ship floating between constellations.

“They’re still out there, waiting for the rescue,” she said, standing underneath the layers of a sparkling starscape, “Time you pull your head out of your arse, don’t you think?”

He saw her move but couldn’t recoil, planted firmly in his spot by the deep roots she cast through his bones. The last thing he saw of her was her wicked smile before she plucked out his eye, the one she’d stolen from him once before. Reclaiming her boon of war, plummeting him into the darkness of her vision.

Now instead of his sister he saw his friend: Valkyrie covered in blood and dirt, standing white against the dark, marred by battle.  

“Did you die?” she demanded, and the world seemed to spin. His arm burned. “Did you die on me, you son of a bitch?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but screamed instead; the lights in his room flickered on as he woke, jolted harshly out of his nightmare by the sound of his own voice.

_Asgard._

* * *

Tony was out of his seat in an instant, rushing out of the council’s chambers and down a spiraling staircase that led to the lower levels out of the palace, out towards the hangers tucked away neatly in the back. Rhodey was close behind, followed by Natasha. Shuri had sent someone to make sure the quinjet was ready to meet them.

“I thought you trashed it,” Rhodey was saying. “You told me you trashed it.”

“I did,” Tony insisted for the hundredth time. “The last model got sent up with Veronica, but I told him— I told _you_ to abandon the project, J.”

 _“I trust I had good reasons to ignore your directive, Sir.”_ Jarvis said from Rhodey’s cell, echoing in speaker-phone. FRIDAY had kindly stopped exploiting a back door in the palace’s internal audio network.

 _“I was right,”_ she said from Tony’s shoulder, a thin stream of nanotech giving her her voice. _“He was full of himself.”_

“No fighting,” Tony insisted. “I don’t need- this isn’t,” he sighed, exasperated. “Jarv’, what’s your sign?”

_“Software version 74.18.3resA—”_

“Date might be more helpful, bud,” Rhodey pointed out, jostling his phone as Tony started taking two steps down at a time. Natasha slid by him with ease to keep up.

_“January 13, 2014. 3:56:17.”_

“Before Ultron,” she realized. “Tony.”

“I know, I know.” He shook his head as they reached the bottom of the stairs, stopping short and turning around as the reached the bottom floor. His voice echoed in this largely empty room, tinted light spilling in through glass walls. “I… before that thing in Cali, I was making suits. Tons of them.”

 _“The Iron Legion,”_ JARVIS supplied.

 _“The_ first _Iron Legion,”_ Friday countered.

“Bruce and I were working on the early stages of ‘Buster and Veronica.” He ignored his bickering bots, turning back around and making his way towards the doors. The quinjet hovered beyond the glass, easing into position on the landing pad. “I developed the Rescue suit at the same time. Bruce was getting his safety net, y‘ know, so why not have another one?”

“And?”

“And the design was to get me a suit if I didn’t have one. Or Pepper, or Happy, or Rhodey.” Approaching the door, he pulled it open for them, letting his friends file out in front of him.

“Then why end it?” Natasha asked as she passed.

“It’s, uh. Well.” He followed Rhodey out, letting the door swing shut behind him. “He’s an Ultron prototype.”

“He’s a _what_?”

 _“I’m autonomous,”_ JARVIS explained. _“Partially. I have administrative rights over my actions.”_

“Limited permissions,” Tony insisted, but it wasn’t very confident. He shook his head in the face of Natasha’s skepticism and possible homicidal thoughts. “Don’t assassinate me. The whole idea is that he’s supposed to be able to help you out when you can’t help yourself. Maybe you’re unconscious. Bleeding out. He’s smart enough to deal with that on his own, but only after you let him loose.”

“Offline, too, right?” Rhodey asked. There was a strange sound on the other side of the phone, metal clinking against metal. JARVIS had to be feeding quarters into the pay phone. Tony had the ridiculous thought of a suit crammed into a telephone booth, which was the very likely reality.

“Yeah. Completely. Once he’s locked on to you and out of Veronica, he’s untraceable.”

 _That’s why Friday didn’t notice._ He’d erased every semblance of the protocol he could find. Whatever JARVIS had kept wouldn’t have been easy to find, which begged the question: _What else were you hiding?_

Natasha’s lips fell into a flat line, but she didn’t say anything. As they stepped out onto the launching pad, the quinjet ramp lowered to greet them, a red-dressed guard stepping down so they could file in. She gave them a short nod as they passed.

“Thanks,” Rhodey said.

“Problem with that, though...” Tony began, lengthening his stride to get to the pilot’s seat. Buttons illuminated and screens flickered on to greet him. “Friday, you good?”

_“Boss.”_

“Problem being,” he continued, “No internet. No phone. No GPS. Just on-board life sustaining systems and weapons, and Jarvis being… well…” He gestured absently and left it at that. “Better not to risk it. Once the nanotech was in, he was out.”

The quinjet sealed up around them and Rhodey found his seat, stretching his legs and shaking his head. After a moment or two, he’d figured out how to route the call into the ship’s comms. Natasha lowered herself down on a bench, pushing away some forgotten blankets as the quinjet hummed, hovering off the ground on autopilot.

“Except he didn’t listen,” she gathered. “I didn’t know he could do that.”

Tony bit the inside of his cheek, thoughtful.

“Neither did I.”

 _“I’m afraid I can’t speak for the actions of my main core,”_ JARVIS interjected carefully. Friday took control of flight systems, pulling them farther up into the sky. _“Perhaps your permissions were too lax, Sir.”_

“Don’t sass me.”

* * *

When Thor woke from his nightmares, dawn had long since passed and the meeting he’d been expected at was likely over. The brightness of the late morning sun seemed dim, muted by a layer of heavy, grey clouds, and the fact that he was once again missing an eye.

Pulling himself upright, sluggish and blearly, he managed to put his feet on the ground and sit on the edge of his bed, palming his face in years-old habit to push his hair out of his face. That proved useless now, leaving him to stare blankly at the floor with his hand on his head.

 _Hela._ Carefully, he felt around the socket she’d left empty. So it had been more than a dream. More than a night terror. His sister still walked the realms and his home was but a smoldering ruin, and for what?

He sighed and pressed his palms together between his knees, bowing his head.

Hela had survived Ragnarok. _Or_ , Thor thought, she knew how to cross the barriers between realms despite being dead. Not exactly surprising, considering who she was. Loki had seemed skeptical that destroying Asgard would be the last of her, even once they’d made for Earth.

_“Do you really think the Goddess of Death dies like the rest of us, brother?”_

“I guess not,” he murmured to the memory, wiping the last of sleep from his eyes. Between the two of them, Loki would certainly know better.

But being dead or not-quite-dead didn’t change what she’d said to him. Hela, ruthless as she was, had never been accused of lying. His people were out there, the last survivors, and the longer he waited the more likely they were to perish.

They came first. Thanos would have to wait.

Taking Stormbreaker from where it lay discarded, Thor cracked his neck and turned the axe over in hand, testing his grip against the bark. Heavy as it was, he found himself mourning his hammer all over again. Perhaps he didn’t need it to be Thor, God of Thunder, but it felt much like he’d lost a piece of himself. His pride, his brother’s scorn, his father’s magic; all that had been carried by that hammer. It had even been Hela’s once, if the murals had anything to say about it.

Still, Stormbreaker was more than an axe. It was his Gungnir, his spear. The Bifrost that they so desperately needed. A weapon for an All-Father, which he must begrudgingly be.

So he closed his eye and turned into himself, reaching out for the powers of a King, the force of Asgard left behind by Heimdall, and sought to see through the rainbow of the Bifrost. Into the dark expanse of space, where his compatriots somewhere wandered. It seemed an impossible task, but he spied them between the stars in no time. A sad lot of scouting ships and escape pods, positioned around the yellow disc of a Sakaarian spaceship. They’d made camp somewhere rich with black sand and low valleys, but he didn’t have the mind to think about where exactly that might be.

When he found the his footing in the _Commodore_ , his eye was All-Seer gold and the world moved in a slower, steadier pace around him, shining brightly around the edges. He saw how Heimdall had, peering into a small room on the ship _,_ neither its finest quarters nor its cockpit. It had been made a makeshift resting place, with blankets and pillows shoved into a corner littered with large empty bottles.

_The Valkyrie._

If it wasn’t her, there was someone else aboard the vessel with the same inclination for drinking rocket fuel, which wasn’t very likely with Volstagg gone.

The thought of his dead friend was nearly distracting enough to get him stabbed. But, being the brother of Loki, he had a seventh sense for such things; he dodged Valkyrie’s blade by a hair’s breadth, twisting back at the very last second before she would’ve cut him through the ribs.

“Hello.”

“For fuck’s sake,” she said, and he laughed. By his father’s beard, he’d never been so happy to see an angry face.

The Valkyrie’s hands dropped in a sweep of unsteady relief. She leaned heavily in the doorway, the fight gusting out of her as she stared at him.

“How drunk am I?”

“Not, I hope,” Thor said, glancing over the remnants of just that, “I’m here, Val.”

She regarded him with nothing less than a healthy dose of skepticism.

“You’re alive?”

“I’m alive.” He watched her shove her daggers back into their sheaths, trying and failing to find her injured. _Thank the Norns._ “Listen, Val, I don’t have a lot of time.”

“Fuck your time,” she insisted. “What happened, Thor? Where’s Heimdall? Where in Hel are you?”

“Not in Hel,” he said quickly, but felt his socket itch at the very mention of it. “I’m on Earth. Where we meant to go. I need you here.”

“Midgard? Thor… Thor, who’s left?” she asked, and he’d be damned if he’d ever heard her sound so unsure before. “The people— Nearly half of them...”

He wouldn’t let her continue. “I know. I know, Val. It’s not your fault, it’s mine.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Tell me you have a pilot.” His eye wandered a rectangular slit of a window nearby, where wind whipped black sand across a desert. He could hazard a guess for the realm, but didn’t dare bring such an omen upon him.

“Me,” she snapped, clearly agitated, but it looked like she barely had the energy for it. “Look, I can’t get all these ships there, and the ones that can can’t cram any more people into them, even with half of ‘em...” she gestured with one hand to indicate something discarded, the expression clear between them. “And we already tried Vanaheim. They won’t harbor refugees. Wouldn’t even keep who they had, we had to take on more in exchange for food and water.”

He frowned deeply. “They’re our allies. Frey—”

“So?” Valkyrie bent down and picked up a bottle that wasn’t quite empty, sloshing with blue liquor. “What’s there to be allied to, Your Majesty? Your...” she clearly meant to say something else, but her eyes fell onto Stormbreaker. “...axe?”

“Aye.”

After side-eyeing his new weapon of choice, she drank down the remaining contents of the bottle in a single swig. If she had something to say about it, she kept the comment to herself.

“Asgard is gone,” she pressed her mouth to her vambrace, wiping away droplets, “They're going to do what they want.”

“Asgard is a people,” Thor insisted, parroting Heimdall.

“The Vanir don’t care. You weren’t there when they bent the knee, I was. Wasn’t pretty.” The bottle clattered loudly to the ground, discarded. “Maybe if the Queen was still around, we’d have more luck. But…”

She shrugged and Thor swallowed hard, protests dying on his lips. The Valkyrie stepped further in her room — if it could even qualify as such — and approached a small screen on the far wall of the room, installed next to a dirty mirror. Perhaps this had been a mechanical closet before she’d occupied it.

“I may have a ship and a pilot,” he conceded, changing the subject as he watched her reflection on the dark glass. “How far are you?”

“Svartalvheim to Midgard? Couple days, maybe,” she shrugged. “If you can fit a

few hundred, we could scrape it out.”

A star map appeared on screen, a rough triangulation of their position in the galaxy. Thor pushed unwanted memories of this realm further back, though a happenstance such as the Convergance would be welcomed at a time like this. The portal he’d known was likely closed and the one of Loki’s knowledge now led to ruins.

“I’ll send someone. A friend,” he added quickly, hoping to assuage her obvious skepticism. “With supplies. Stay alive until then.”

“Where will you be?”

“Making sure you all have a place to sleep.”

Accepting this, she nodded, crossing her arms and turning to lean against the wall. There wasn’t much left to say, but he didn’t dare leave her yet. A part of him feared it would be the last time he’d ever see her, though she was mere lightyears away from him now. Even if he couldn’t take them all by Bifrost, he could take her — not that she’d ever leave the people he’d charged her to protect, nor would he leave them without her protection.

“Your majesty…”

“Aye?”

“Who’s left?”

He swallowed hard. She waited.

“...Bruce is fine,” he managed.

And that was all.

* * *

The piano was still sitting in the same place Tony remembered it being; in the entrance of the so-called family room, where he’d slept off all nighters and black-out binges on a plush couch, which was still shoved underneath the tall window looking out on the garden, now draped with its dusty curtains instead of the immaculate white drapes Edwin had insisted on. It, as well as the rest of the fine furniture, was covered in plastic, untouched since 1991. 

The door to Howard’s brownstone was wide open in the foyer, framing the massive body of the quinjet hovering over a neighborhood street. Tony and Rhodey stood together there, returning to the place they hadn’t been in together since their college years.

“I’ve got this side,” Rhodes said, splitting the work between them and leaving Tony alone to face a place he only dared to visit in simulation.

He steadied himself with a hand on the wall, standing in the archway that led into the room where he’d failed to say goodbye to his parents.

“Yeah…”

He blinked against the soft light filtering in between heavy curtain shades, putting a dull shine across the black piano. This wasn’t a cerebral hologram. Not a billion dollar tech therapy session. He was home for the first time since the Clinton era, staring at the instrument his Mother had taught him how to play.

Because Pepper was here.

“Pep?”

She was supposed to be here.

 _Focus_ , _Stark_.

The thought of her carried him through the living room and further back into the home he’d abandoned for the California coast. It was the literal last place he would’ve ever called a safe house, but his mansion had never been rebuilt and the Tower was sold, gutted and stripped down to bare bones for another company’s build. JARVIS hadn’t had anywhere else to go. He was from before the Compound.

Not that any sort of JARVIS would’ve known about the new headquarters. That was Vision’s territory, not his.

“Pepper?!”

He turned the a corner that would lead into the kitchen - where Edwin had put him up on the counter and showed him how to cut vegetables, where Ana had tried to teach him how to cook when all he wanted to do was tear apart the KitchenAide to see how it worked - and abruptly slammed into a wall of blue-and-white metal. A whirl of expensive components brought two heavy hands to his shoulders.

_“Sir.”_

Two bright, impassive eyes stared down at him. Tony stared back at the face of one of his suits, feeling his mouth go dry. That was an empty suit. A walking, talking, autonomous—

“JARVIS.”

He tried to look around him, but the suit was taller than he was. The light in its eyes matched the wavelength of his voice, dimming and brightening with every word.

_“Miss Potts is in the kitchen.”_

“Then— Christ,” he cursed, shrugging the gauntlets off his shoulders and dodging out of the way of JARVIS’ reach, squeezing between him and the wall. “Fucking _move._ Pepper?!”

“Tony?”

The sound of her voice might’ve knocked the wind straight out of him. He stumbled around Rescue, who was all bulk and shoulders in the narrow hall.

_“Sir, it’s not—”_

Tony twisted out of the way of the suit’s grip when JARVIS went for his collar, ducking low and spilling out in the kitchen in one clumsy tumble. Rhodey was already there, standing next to the old bar Howard had treated like a drinking fountain. It was still stocked with dusty bottles of liquor.

“Tony.” The bottles sloshed and clinked as Rhodey hip-checked the bar to get around the kitchen island, meaning to help him up off the ground.

Tony, however, was already grappling his way up to his feet, using a nearby countertop for support.

“Holy shit.”

Across the room, in the breakfast nook he’d once spent a thousand mornings hungover in, Pepper sat bent over the table, an untouched breakfast discarded next to a landline phone.

“Pep, Pepper.” He shoulder around Rhodey to get to her, trying not to see the injuries. She was holding a single tablet between her hands — a piece of Rescue? — and her leg stuck out at an odd angle underneath the table, uncasted and supported by a single pillow. Cuts and scrapes contoured her cheeks, adding to the gaunt look her thousand-yard stare was casting.

When he finally reached her and took her face in his hands, handling her so carefully, like she might blow away on the next breeze, he had enough time to ask, “Where’d you go, babe?” before registering just how hot his hands were becoming.

“Tony.” Her voice broke and she finally saw him, but there wasn’t going to be any easy getting up with that leg.

“ _Pepper_.” It was a breathless, pained sort of sound that came out of him, but she didn’t look like she wanted to hear it.

“I’m, I’m okay,” she insisted, pulling back from his touch.

“You’re not _, no._ ” He reached up and pushed her dirty hair back, hand on her forehead and cheek. “You’re not okay, you have a fever, you...”

“I’m okay. Tony.” He felt her hand on his arm and then on his face, across the scruff of his beard as she wiped away a tear that threatened to fall. She was practically steaming.

“This is my fault.” His face felt hot and his eyes burned, but the more he blinked the more they watered. “Pep—” He craned his neck back around, where he’d left JARVIS standing. “What the hell happened?”

The suit had to angle to fit back through the doorway, standing with Rhodey. _“Sir—”_

“No, I am _fine_.”

“Pepper.”

“Happy. Happy, Tony, he just,” her hand flew away from his face, moving with every thought she had difficulty expressing. Every protest he wanted to say fell back as his heart plummeted into his stomach. “We were under an overpass and it— Happy was driving, then he wasn’t. It went down. On us, me— On me.”

 _No, no, no_ **_no_** _._ “...We’ll get him back,” he said, because there was no other alternative. “I promise.” He pushed her bangs back again. “I promise, but Christ… This fever, your leg—”

“Tony?” she cut him off, putting her hand over the one on her cheek. It anchored him there, familiar in the way that she always had to be, the only stable support he knew. The woman holding him up wasn’t as battered as the world wanted her to be, bright and angry despite her broken bones. If he had any energy left he was using it now, falling in love with her for the hundredth time. “Tell me what happened.”

So he told her.

Peter crumbled away in his hands all over again.

* * *

“Where the hell’d your eye go?” Rocket demanded, adjusting what seemed to be a particularly stubborn bolt on the ramp of the _Bataaran._ Thor touched his eyepatch without much thought, still sifting through the memories of his not-so-dream-like nightmare. “I paid good credits for that.”

“My sister stole it,” he said honestly, “Half-sister. And I thought you won it at a bet.”

“Sure, whatever.” Rocket stopped his ratcheting to give him the side-eye. In the heat of Wakanda’s sun, he toiled at fixing the minimal damage done to his ship from its travels back from Titan. “How many half-sisters ya got, exactly?”

“Just the one.” He squatted down next to him, observing his toolwork. “Anyway, I’ve another favor to ask you, if you’ll entertain it.”

”What’s in it for me?”

Thor smiled because he knew it was meant to be a levity, but it felt disingenuous. Perhaps it was.

“I’ve a friend not so far from here. The Valkyrie—”

“A Valkyrie?” Rocket asked, incredulous. There was a clatter of him abandoning his work, letting the tool fall to the grass as he turned around. “I thought they all died.”

“I, erm.” Thor laughed in slight disbelief. “You’re knowledgeable of my people, rabbit. Moreso than most.”

“Not a rabbit,” he insisted. “And I know what makes money, Thunder-brains, I was a bounty hunter. Good at it, too. Did my research.” 

He beat his chest once with his fist, prideful. The prospect of Asgardians fetching a high bounty was a strange, unsettling thought to Thor, their King, but he knew to pity the fool who thought they could best a Valkyrie.

“That’s how you knew about Nidavellir.”

“Kinda. No one could ever really get into that sector without getting lost. Used to be guides to lead the way, thousands of years ago, but ain’t no one seen one. Called ‘em Valkyrie, but most people don’t think they ever existed.” He shrugged, gesturing back towards the ship. “Then you hit the windshield like a bird.”

He rubbed his little paws together, considering something. Thor couldn’t help the pang of shame in his chest, knowing so little about his people’s history. To him, the Valkyrie were the fearsome warriors that helped claim the Nine. Outside that Nine, they might’ve been regarded as gatekeepers. What was true and what was not would forever be unclear.

“So,” Rocket interrupted his thoughts, “a Valkyrie friend, huh?”

“Aye,” Thor nodded. “The last, in fact. She’s meant to lead the rest of Asgard to safety here but lacks the ships. I was hopeful you’d be willing to lend your own to the cause.” He reached forward, pinching the head of the stubborn bolt between two fingers and twisting. It popped free with a metallic groan. “But I understand if—”

Rocket snatched the bolt from his hand, throwing it over his shoulder and rifling through his pockets for a new one. He palmed the new piece of hardware to him.

“What’re friends for, huh? And, shit,” he smiled. Thor thought his seemed a little disingenuous, too, but what could he expect after the journey they’d been through. “Not every day you get to meet a Valkyrie.”

He smiled, grateful, and set to putting the new bolt in place. His friend ratcheted it down properly to ensure its stability.

“She’ll be glad to meet you,” he assured him, though it was a fool’s bet. “Just… have a bar stocked, perhaps.”

That would probably do the trick.

* * *

_“Her temperature is 115 degrees Fahrenheit and rising,”_ JARVIS was saying, sitting awkwardly on the floor of the quinjet as Natasha piloted them out of the dreary capitol city. The Rescue suit did its best to cross its legs, but only managed a poor impression of it.

Pepper pulled a blanket tighter around her shoulders, shaking her head.

“I feel fine.”

Tony had her leg extended over his thighs, both of them sitting on one of the benches usually reserved for Bruce. He inspected it with careful hands, gently checking her for an injury she’d insisted on having just yesterday.

“You should be in an ice bath,” Rhodey insisted from his seat. Tony pushed a hand over his face and through his hair, thinking hard on things he’d hoped were over.

“Pepper, if you leg was actually broken yesterday…” He couldn’t find any evidence of a broken bone. Not even a fracture. “Jarv’ said you were under that overpass for four days.”

“And seven hours,” Natasha corrected, reserved. JARVIS nodded with a distinct whir and Rhodey huffed, biting his bottom lip.

“You shouldn’t be alive.”

Pepper pursed her lips, knuckles white under her chin where she held her blanket closed. They already knew what the answer was, the unfortunate explanation for how she’d survived four terrible days under metal and concrete, groping for her phone in the dark between bouts of unconsciousness.

“I,” Tony swallowed hard, thinking out loud. “I thought I got it all out. This shouldn’t…” He couldn’t bare to look at her. “Pepper, I’m so sorry.”

“I’ll be fine,” she insisted, but didn’t seem quite sure of it. “I’m alive.”

Tony squeezed her leg gently.

“You’re right…” he conceded, but that didn’t smother the guilt.

Without him, there may have never been an Extremis for Killian to abuse. No cracked code on the back of a name tag. Turned out his helpfulness that night was going to be another one of those mistakes he couldn’t just fix and be done with, the same he couldn’t take back all the weapons he’d sold.

Pepper wasn’t the first person changed by experimental injection. She wouldn’t be the last. The problem with this one was that he’d helped create it.

 _But,_ he thought, dragging himself out of the cycle of blame, Pepper was alive. He was a chronic fuck-up, sure, but that hadn't killed her yet. Through everything, they were still together.

“We’ll stabilize it, babe,” he promised, moving around to her to kiss her feverish temple. She leaned into him and Rhodey sighed, going to join Natasha at the controls. JARVIS moved to stared at a specific spot on the floor, doing whatever it was he did in his downtime. “Let’s go home.” 


	3. Three Years Later (you crawled out of your grave)

That’s just what they did: they went home. They picked up their broken pieces and started to tape them back together, putting band-aids on injuries that needed stitching. It was good enough.

Steve was already at the compound when Natasha landed the quinjet. He wasn’t there to greet them on the landing pad, but Bruce was, eyes wide when he saw Pepper and the Rescue suit step down off the ramp, the latter carrying the former like a bride across a threshold.

 _“Hello, Dr. Banner,”_ greeted the voice of JARVIS, nodding his stiff head. Tony and the others were trailing behind him.

“I, uh—” Bruce tried, “but you—”

“Uh-huh.” Tony stopped short and let the rest of them pass by, giving him a reassuring clap on the shoulder. “Let it out, buddy.”

“I—I thought you, we—” Bruce turned a full one-eighty to watch Rescue-JARVIS take Pepper inside, bubbling with a sort of confusion that managed to look like relief. Tony squeezed his shoulder. “Rescue was scrapped!”

“Yeah, I know.”

Later, Steve stood in front of some cameras and told the world what had happened while Pepper sat in the medical wing, propped up in her cot, splattering herself with ink when she gripped a pen too tightly. Vision lay silent on a cold slab in the lab above her, brought back home from Wakanda. Bruce and Tony combed through old files as JARVIS stood eerily still in front of a television screen, listening to the story their good Captain told. The message that they’d have to find a way to move on rang hollow for them all.

Natasha tried to find Clint again, listening for him on radio waves, but ended up alone in the training rooms instead, firing away at targets that carried the weight of her burdens with every bullet hole. This was nothing like Budapest. Nothing like they’d ever seen before.

Thor came home a week later with five hundred refugees and a fleet of spaceships — Rocket at his side, picking something out of his teeth — and asked if his people could sleep on the ground in hangar until they found better refuge. No one could find it in themselves to be surprised when Tony, clearly offended, yelled “You expect me to let these people sleep on the _floor?_ ”

(They slept on cots, beds, mounds of blankets, and a group of weary looking healers and sorcerers took over the medical bay for the wounded. Emergency stores of food were distributed, a group of elderly women with ornate braids started a garden along the north fence, and men of all ages walked the perimeter of the compound at night just to stretch their legs. Tony and Thor were piecing together the beginning of the Asgardia Project while Steve played diplomatic middle-man, the returned spokesman of the Avengers  now the newly appointed representative for Midgard’s Heroes; Jane Foster maintained the role of Ambassador by Thor’s decree, once Natasha found her at a Red Cross center in Greenwich.)

The Wakandans kept in touch — Shuri most often, who had constant conference calls with Tony about both Vision and Pepper. The latter was stable enough that no one was afraid she’d spontaneously combust, but the effects were still there: enhanced strength, mild fever, the occasional blush of molten-red light in her cheeks. A couple of melted handprints throughout the compound and lots of broken pens. Spearheading the Stark Relief Fund wasn’t conducive to a stress-free environment, after all.

Good thing they knew a guy who knew a thing or two about enhancement serums.

There wasn’t much to be done about Vision. While Tony tried to deny that Pepper hanging out with Steve didn’t bother him, he kept himself busy with the theoreticals: what was the margin of success if they put Vision online without the mind stone, and if they managed it, what was the likely outcome; how much of Ultron or JARVIS made him the way he was, and what was the likelihood that their favorite psychotic A.I. would make a resurgence? Wakanda had made neat work of the vibranium rebuild, he looked _fine_ — it was the decision of whether or not they should wake him up that had him on edge.

Any margin of error above .01 percent was too much and their chance of Ultron was sitting at a happy twenty-five percent. No one in their right mind would wake him up.

But who was in their right mind, anymore?

Luckily JARVIS and Friday were around for that. Two bickering A.I.s that did, for all intents and purposes, have their right minds, and one even had a body— Tony preferred not having two systems like that inhabiting the same space. They were making quick work of keeping everyone in check, especially when he didn’t have JARVIS in time-out for upgrades. (If Rescue was going to be walking around like it was, it might as well look less 2014.)

That was home. Projects and predictions, a patchwork group of aliens, intelligences, and superheroes trying to make the best out of the end of the world. Their eyes were firmly glued to the stars — to the how-tos, what-ifs, and whereabouts of Thanos, who’d plunged them elbow-deep into blood and dust.

What mattered more, though, was the fact that Hela was elbows-deep in uru at the very moment that the Avengers stumbled back home and tried to recuperate, letting time do what it would around her as she sculpted a body made from her fire, metal, and blood.

The forge of Hel smoldered at her feet, flames finally extinguished now that its magic metal glowed with the hot spark of a soul. Already touched by the Eternal Flame, her palms didn’t burn as she molded something out of the blackness, the cracks of it skin radiating red before cooling over again. It was instead the magic that bit, all the ancient things she’d thrown into the mess grating against her palms, pulling a mess of blood into the mix, but it was easy enough to ignore. Blood was needed in these sorts of dealings; it was no unnecessary loss.

Time was not patient enough to wait for her. While she carved and needled the finer details of life into her craft, time unspooled its own threads, weaving stories outside her power. Life wouldn’t wait for death - it was often quite the opposite.

Not that Hela cared.

When she was done, standing back from the thing that would be Loki, Brokk lingered behind her with tools in hand. The other thread of Loki’s soul remained around her wrist, a shred of what he had been looped there to preserve the past — yet, in all honesty, it was mostly for spite. She couldn’t have the brothers thinking that she was kind.

“What do you think?” she asked, folding her arms. The  dwarf behind her gave a short grunt.

“Still looks like a little shit, if you’re askin’ me.”

The smile that spread across her lips seemed to betray the general demeanor of a Queen, but she didn’t try to hide it. Picking at the glowing green scrap around her wrist, she unthreaded it and let it hover over her palm, watching it writhe like an injured snake. _No,_  she thought, _a snake won’t do._

“Well,” Hela stood aside and let Brokk do his work, picking up the Prince between his pincers. He seemed to be careful about it, grabbing the thing between its ribs so if he left a mark wouldn’t be too prevalent. “Let’s get this done with.”

So it would be done.

Time sped by with every lumbering step of a dwarven forgemaster, every impatient tap of Hela’s black nails against a stone basin. The water within was clear, but the bottom was obscured, dark and murky in its depth. Here a sword hot from the fire might cool, or an axe or hammer. But for this thing the results would be entirely different.

The statue of a boy soon stared down at those depths— at that endless darkness, where no smooth stone awaited it, promising only water and the cool nature that came with it. Transformation was imminent, it’s malleable mass meant to become something stronger, less breakable than the thing that had come before it, but the statue couldn’t know this. Its blank eyes saw nothing. In the realm of the unworthy dead it remained a conglomerate of magic and metal, a housing for a tattered soul that didn’t wake, didn’t speak, comfortable in the realm of sleep. Water would not wake it, nor the blood and magic that preceded it. But. _But._

It did hear a voice. The stuttered echoes of a bitter, strange sentence.

“...the Eternal Flame...” her incantation sparked behind his eyes, gave him mind and matter, but it was her bitter summoning that gusted air into his lungs and shocked a beat into his heart. “...give me strength.”

Being woken up, it turned out, felt like burning.

The thing—no, the Boy, thrashed against a nightmare and opened his eyes in the dark, still burning in the purple fires of a dream. Cold wouldn’t extinguish his agony. He knew that there was a chill around him, an intrusive cold that came with this sort of darkness, but it felt distant, just out of his reach. Instead a wrongness that he had no name for sank its claws between his ribs and pulled down, an invisible hand pulling him farther into the dark, into the agony that burned white-hot but refused to give light. This void knew no realms, no fractured rainbows, no stretched starlight that should accompany a fall like this… Only the dark. The shadows. Things that spoke with no mouth, no body or face, haunting anything that crossed their path.

 _“You’ll never be a God,”_ taunted a voice, echoing across the galaxy, and he didn’t know why it made his neck hurt. Why it felt like he was gasping, drowning against the sound of breaking bones scraping inside his skull. It was different than the burning,  louder in its isolation, like a twig snapped underfoot or a bone broken on a silent battlefield. The interruption of peace; a body breaking, grinding, scraping when it shouldn’t— someone _screaming_ while his fires drew themselves inward, consuming his lungs until he, too, wanted to scream for mercy.

Only then did the epiphany strike.

 _I can’t breathe._

That was what prompted change: his first thought. Consciousness turned the dark on its head and light finally found its way down to him, filtered dimly through a murky veil above. This cold, terrifying dark was just water — he was only drowning, floating in an abyss that had no sense of top and bottom. This wasn’t nothing. It was _something._

 _Only drowning,_ he thought blearily, as if he were lucky to be dying. _Got to breathe._

It couldn’t be that hard, right?

So he swam; he saw his hands for the first time, kicked his unfamiliar feet and reached for that light above, desperate to escape the depths of this dark. The surface rushed down to meet him, faster than he could possibly carry himself, and he breached and beached all in the same moment; sputtering, a Boy fell belly-first onto stone, coughing and spitting blood and water. It was impossible to tell when exactly he had started wretching, but there was bile between his trembling hands, bitter and hot as he tried to find a moment to breathe between his body’s protests.

 _I can breathe,_ he thought, and then laughed at how stupid that sounded, flopping onto his back and staring up at the sky above him— no, at the stone. More stone. _I can breathe and… I’m in a cave._

That he was managing to put any effort into thought at all was astounding, but his own accomplishments didn’t seem important in that moment. Legs still dipped in the pool he’d just fallen out of, the Boy focused on catching his breath, too caught up in the adrenaline rush to consider anything else. There was grey stone all around him, a presumably bottomless pool at his feet. His throat and lungs ached and his bones popped at the joints with any small movement. Water dripping and creatures crawling made up all the ambient noise here and, upon further inspection — which was nothing more than a lackluster display of neck rolling to see where he’d ended up — the Boy decided there wasn’t much more to discover about this place.

Except the bird sitting in the corner, of course.

Slowly, he rolled himself over onto his belly (starkly aware of his nudity now, bare skin on _cold, very cold_ stone) to get a look at the black feathered creature. It perched on the edge of a taller boulder that overlooked the spring, standing squarely on a stack of dusty grey-and-blue fabric. If birds were capable of looking annoyed, this one certainly was; it stared at him with an intensity that seemed uncharacteristic of carrion.

“Hello?” His voice grated like glass over stone, barely a whisper. The bird only blinked at him, ruffling its wings on further annoyance.

The Boy was seriously considering what he should say next, lightly massaging the soreness out of his throat when the bird decided to respond.

“Hello.”

The Boy sort of scrambled, startled, instinctively (read: accidentally) slipping and splashing right back into the pool where he’d come from. Fortunately, there was something to meet his feet this time, and a jagged set of rocks was better than an endless fall — but, unfortunately, he didn’t have time to enjoy it when he realized he wasn’t alone.

There was a man staring down at him. Or something that looked like a man, transparent enough not to be corporeal but too opaque to be a ghost, glowing with a soft green light around the edges.

“Who—what—”

Its expression skewed towards skepticism as the Boy found steadier, less painful footing through his blabbering. The not-quite-a-ghost loomed over him, a tall figure of pale skin, black hair, and flat, matte clothing with no lack of pleats and clasps. It was sort of impossible to compare it to anything since the Boy didn’t have a lot of knowledge to make comparisons with, but he knew enough to think of leather and duster jackets, that the colors of green and black meant something, and that the swoop of gold on his chest looked important

“Of course,” it muttered, and all the seriousness bled out of his expression an instant. His shoulders slumped forward as he pinched the bridge of his nose, hiding an impatient, frustrated sort of expression behind his palm. The bird hung its head to match. “Damn her.”

So the Boy waited, hands awkwardly hovering over the surface of the unmercifully clear water. Maybe the cave was haunted.

“Erm…”

“Yes?”

The maybe-a-ghost’s lips didn’t move when he spoke, his expression shifting to match the tone of his sourcelss voice. As he pulled his gloved hand back and looked down at him, so did the bird; they mimicked each other’s movements equally, if not exactly.

Somehow, the Boy already knew why.

“You’re…” he managed, looking between them both. The man rolled his eyes.

“Indeed,” he nodded. So did the bird, bobbing his beak up and down.

“I— uhm…” It didn’t quite feel like he was falling again, but his head was spinning. He had plenty of questions other than _why are you a ghost bird, or are you a ghost possessing a bird,_ but, unfortunately, those seemed like the easiest to answer right now. Even if bird-man didn’t want to answer them. “Are you— Where are we?”

“A Water or Sights,” he answered plainly. “It appears so, at least. I…” He trailed off, staring blankly at the middle space between them before his demeanor shifted. Spine straightening, he pushed back a lock of hair that had fallen in his face and then swiftly took a seat, folding his long legs in a graceful motion. “I mean you no harm, Boy. Welcome to the worlds.”

That didn’t mean anything to him, but he managed to force a smile anyway, awkwardly rubbing his arm.

“Thanks.”

Carefully, cautiously, he decided it was best to get out of the water and the bird pecked at the pile of fabric it had been standing on before hopping off, settling in the hollow of the man’s lap. Neither of them acknowledged his nudity any further.

“Um…” He unfolded the fabric to find a convenient set of clothes, from which bugs were quick to evacuate when he started to beat the layer of dust off of them. “So… you’re not going to hurt me.”

The man smiled, humorless. “That would be quite against the point of this, wouldn’t it?”

 _So, no._ That was a good start, at least. Didn’t explain anything and maybe meant that people usually seeing this guy was a bad thing, but it wasn’t a bad thing for him. Yet.

He pulled the plain shirt over his head, which hung so long it covered his hips like a long tunic, far too large and wide for his stature. But it was better than being naked, so on went the even baggier and longer hooded long-sleeve, making a mess of his wet hair as it went over.

Being mostly dressed didn’t do anything to make him feel less vulnerable in front of the ghost-bird-man, but he supposed the came with the territory of waking up somewhere nude and confused.

“So…” He stepped into the stiff trousers, struggling with the buttons for a moment. It would take a miracle for these things to stay on his hips unassisted. “You, er, don’t happen to know why I— we’re,” he corrected quickly, “here, do you?”

The man folded his fingers underneath his chin, elbows pincushioned against his legs. Him and his bird— _they_ , he supposed, both stared at him, heads tilted to one side with curiosity.

“What _do_ you know?” he decided to ask instead, because of course this couldn’t be easy.

 _Would it be a good story if it was?_ he wondered, but the thought only left him more confused. What did that matter?

“I…” he swallowed hard, tugging on the excess folds in his borrowed clothes. At least they were warm. “Not much, honestly. I…” _I don’t even know my name,_ he wanted to say, but feared facing that truth. “Does it matter?”

“Yes,” they nodded, but didn’t seem surprised.

“Who are you, anyway?”

“Hm…” their expressions soured somewhat — or at least the man’s did, because the bird could only ruffle its feathers to show annoyance. He raked his hand through his hair and closed his eyes, considering something. It didn’t seem like he wanted to answer, but relented to the question anyway. “She calls me Ikol.”

_She?_

He wouldn’t ask. A part of his mind, quieter than the rest of him, warned him not to. No matter how wrong it sounded, how fundamentally incorrect that name felt in his throat, he _should not ask._

“Ikol,” he said, forcing the word around his tongue. It wasn’t so bad. “Ikol the bird.”

Ikol nodded, expression carefully blank. “A raven, I think. A piece of you trapped in the form of one.”

“A piece of me?”

“Indeed.”

In that moment the raven took flight. Ikol’s form disappeared without spectacle and he found a perch on his shoulder, the sharpness of his talons dulled through the layers of fabric. The Boy stared at his beady eyes, listening to him speak somewhere inside his skull.

“So the question you should be asking,” Ikol prompted, settling carefully beside his ear, “Is who are we?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally.
> 
> Main inspirations come from the _Agent of Asgard_ and _Journey into Mystery (2011)_ comic runs. And — **spoilers** — because I know you’re going to ask, this isn’t kid!Loki. I wanted him to be slightly older, so he’s closer to his age in _Agent of Asgard._ It’ll be covered more in the next chapter.
> 
> Please let me know what you think!
> 
> EDIT: ON HIATUS (9/5/2019)


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